What’s Your Long Shadow?
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When I hear people speaking German, or even speaking English with a German accent, the hair on the back of my neck stands straight up, my pupils dilate, and my heart begins to beat faster. This reflexive, visceral reaction to anything German is my brain’s way of telling my body – stay away – DANGER, DANGER. It was, after all, the Germans who thought up and efficiently executed [pun intended] the murder of European Jewry. My first thought is Yemach Shemom – may their names be stamped out. My next thought is – what was your grandfather or great grandfather doing between 1939 and 1945?
Thus, the question “whether the sins of the fathers contaminate the children – and if so, for how long?” – posed by Susan Neiman in her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Meaning of Evil, gave me pause.
Neiman’s book hopes to draw lessons from the post-Holocaust attitude and actions of processing the guilt of starting World War II and murdering six million Jews. Her book hopes to bring these lessons home – to America – and encourage those of us across the pond to think more deeply about how we can look at our past, particularly how we deal with our dark history of slavery.
Honestly, I am only part way through the first section of the book, so I cannot fully report, but I am moved by what I read yesterday and I want to share.
I learned of a German author, Alexandra Senfft, whose grandfather was the Third Reich’s envoy in Slovakia during the war. He was the one to sign the order deporting the Slovak Jews, sending them to their deaths. During the war, Alexandra’s mother, Irika, recalls the beautiful villa that they lived in during their time in Bratislava. Of course, the villa was stolen from a Jewish family. Irika learned, just before Christmas in 1947, that her father was executed for war crimes in Slovakia. Alexandra wrote a book – Silence Hurts: A German Family History – about her family’s story. Alexandra’s mother, Irika, suffered from deep depression during her life and the author was searching to understand the cause of her silent pain.
Though her family ostracized her after the publication of Silence Hurts, many Germans wrote to Senfft and spoke with her about their own family’s secrets from the war. After hearing so many other stories, Senfft wrote a second book titled The Long Shadow of Perpetrators: Descendants Face Their Nazi Family History, about how this long shadow of Nazi past affects the post-war generations.
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“No one likes admitting mistakes,” Neiman writes, “[but] what does it take to admit that your parents were world historically wrong?”
Each German family dealt with this trauma in their own way. But many born in the late 1950’s and 1960’s took a hard look at their history and what their grandparents did during the war and wanted to do “something.” This is the generation that watched the 1961 Eichmann trials in Jerusalem and the 1963-65 Auschwitz trials in Germany, which charged 22 defendants with crimes for their actions at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These trials, especially the Auschwitz trials, brought the horrors of the Holocaust into German citizens’ living rooms and the parents and grandparents could no longer hide in silence. A generation of Germans went from being heroes, to being victims, and then finally perpetrators. It was a shift in the public mindset and the next generations grew up attempting to process it all.
Alexandra Senfft is working to bridge the gap between emotional and cognitive wrestling of the past. According to Neiman, Senfft feels that if the children and grandchildren of the Nazis don’t do this work, they will pass their unprocessed feelings onto their children in an unhealthy way. Neiman tells of groups, made up of children of victims and children of perpetrators, that get together to look each other in the eye and process feelings and facts. It was the children of the 1960’s, Neiman states, that broke the silence.
In Sennft’s own words:
“Every democracy must be stimulated, challenged and developed – continuously. Democracy lives and thrives through self-critical confrontation with the past – personal and collective – and by scrutinizing the assumptions of earlier generations.
Where such reflection does not take place, people adhere rigidly to generationally-transmitted patterns of thinking, feeling and action. Lack of reflection allows far-right and nationalistic forces present outmoded messages of salvation that develop their own dynamics and create new injustice.
By means of dialogue my work, in an interdisciplinary and international fashion, confronts the past to develop tasks for the present so that society can withstand anti-democratic trends and movements in the future.”
Alexandra Senfft (http://alexandra-senfft.com/)
I got no sense from Neiman’s book as to how widespread these feelings or actions are among Germans. Surely, we still see antisemitism in Germany, but unfortunately, antisemitism is alive and well in many places, including our own backyard.
I wonder if we all live in a long shadow of some kind.
